


Legends

by destroythemeek



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: 1970s, 20th Century History, Growing Old Together, M/M, Queer History, San Francisco, Santa Fe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-30
Updated: 2009-04-30
Packaged: 2018-02-08 11:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1938819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destroythemeek/pseuds/destroythemeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>92-year-old David Jacobs remembers the life he's lived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legends

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following lgbtfest 2009 prompt: "Jack and David have been together for almost their entire lifetimes. Now that they're in their late 80s/early 90s (the late 1960s/70s), how do they feel about the rise of the public gay rights movement? What changes have they seen over the course of the 20th century?"
> 
> Thanks to [TheSecondBatgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSecondBatgirl/pseuds/TheSecondBatgirl) for betaing!

They were legends in 1970s San Francisco: a gay couple that had been together since the 19th century. David knew that wasn't technically true; he and Jack had danced around each other, scared and uncertain, until 1901. But Jack liked the poetic sound of it, and would happily repeat the white lie to anyone who asked. He had, after all, always loved improving the truth.

So it wasn’t any surprise when, on that breezy early summer day, a young man turned in his seat on the cable car and said, his voice polite and tentative, “Excuse me, sir, but aren’t you David Jacobs?”

David could feel his old bones creaking as he craned his neck to see the boy. He couldn’t have been more than 22, wiry and pale with glasses that reflected the sun, and he was looking at David with something approaching awe. “That I am,” David replied, with a thin smile.

“Wow.” The boy remained awestruck, and David waited patiently for him to continue. He wasn’t going anywhere, after all. “It’s just, uh – I think it’s really neat, you know? That you and Jack managed to stay together for so long. I—sorry.” The boy stuck out a hand, and energy practically radiated from his skin. “I’m Tom. I’ve been helping out with Mr. Milk’s campaign. They, uh, talk about you a lot.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Tom.” David took the proffered hand and shook it, surprised as always by how weak his grip had become. It seemed weaker every day, and the chances of his seeing his 93rd birthday seemed ever slimmer. A few weeks ago, the thought might have bothered him, but David had made peace with his mortality in the upheaval of the past few days. He almost welcomed it.

Tom bit his lip, looking David up and down. He would have made a good newsie, David couldn’t help thinking. Observant, energetic, not afraid to open his mouth. But he also couldn’t help sensing that this energy and confidence was something new. David knew this boy’s type: a Midwestern kid – the accent was obvious in his vowels – who’d moved to San Francisco to be himself for the first time in his life. David was happy that Tom had found Harvey Milk’s campaign, had found substance to cling to. Too many boys with stars in their eyes and nothing in their pockets wound up walking the streets every night to get by.

“Was it hard?” Tom asked, after a quiet moment. David could feel the breeze blowing back the few white hairs he still had as the cable car swept uphill past palm trees and tall buildings. “I mean, things aren’t exactly great now, but even a few years back, I can’t even imagine...” His voice grew quieter. “Was it hard to be what you were?”

David stared out at the palm trees. Hard? David knew what the word meant. Hard had been watching his mother die of influenza. Hard had been sending his little brother off to be maimed in the Great War. Hard had been leaving everything and everyone he knew behind and boarding a train destined for Santa Fe.

Loving Jack? That had never been hard.

But it hadn’t been easy, either. David remembered the early years, stolen moments on the rooftop or Medda’s back rooms. He’d been running errands for the Sun, working his way up to a reporter position, and Jack had found steady work he hated in a factory. Jack had a room in a boarding house that he shared with a few of the other former newsies, but he spent more time at the Jacobs’, eating dinner there almost every night and slipping a few coins into David’s pockets at the end of each week as compensation. David didn’t want to accept the money, but he knew it would hurt Jack more to return it.

They never talked about what was going on between them. Even David, the Walking Mouth, didn’t have the words to explain it. But they knew they loved each other; knew they’d be lost without each other. And they knew they liked kissing each other, touching each other, discovering more pleasures every time they found themselves alone.

David had gotten his own apartment eventually, but Jack didn’t move in; they didn’t want to raise suspicion. After awhile, his mother stopped asking if he’d met any nice girls lately, and he began to refer to himself as a “confirmed bachelor.” Jack did much the same, though he was better at pretending; he flirted with women just enough for those around him to believe he preferred to play the field than settle down with any one girl. Jack got his own place in the same building as David’s, and if they sometimes spent the night in each other’s apartments, the other tenement-dwellers chose to look the other way.

It wasn’t until after David’s family changed drastically – after his mother died, after his sister married, after his brother came home without his right arm – that he’d felt wild enough to change that status quo. It was David, not Jack, who suggested they go to Santa Fe – David who finally began to feel that restless need for freedom that had always been bubbling just beneath the surface of Jack’s skin. They’d saved up enough money, and David was able to secure a job with a Santa Fe newspaper. The time was finally right.

In Santa Fe, they told everyone they were brothers and people mostly believed them. Jack needed a new name, anyway, to distance himself from his checkered past, and so he took David’s – he’d already been an honorary Jacobs for years. They took a room together, and, later, a ranch. They bought two beds – one cheap, one more lavish – and if company ever thought the cheap bed looked too perfectly-made, they blamed it on David’s obsession with neatness. 

David was never any good at the ranching life. Jack loved the horses, loved the fields and working with his hands every day. David helped out as best he could, but he was a city boy at heart, and he clung to his newspaper job that at least put him in town every few days. The ranch made good money, and they did well -- better than either of them had ever done before.

Years passed, and David began to think they'd stay in Santa Fe forever. There were worse things that could happen. They had a nice life, and they had privacy. But it wasn't perfect. David wondered, sometimes, if any of their friends in Santa Fe suspected their true relationship, and he almost wished they did. The lying was tiring, and it scared him to think that Jack could die tomorrow and he wouldn't even be able to be honest at his funeral. He started to wonder what had happened to the boys who weren't afraid to challenge the powerful. Started to wonder what happened to their sense of justice, and standing up for the rights they knew they should have.

They were already getting on in age when they started to hear the rumors: there was a group of homosexual men discharged from the army who had begun to form a community in San Francisco. It was Jack who heard the news, which was unusual; David was the one who read the newspaper cover to cover every day. But Jack had other contacts -- he's always been better at navigating the less-public parts of society. And, just as it had been David who finally fulfilled Jack's dreams of Santa Fe, it was Jack who brought up the idea of bringing David back to city life.

"Come on, Davey," he'd said. "Something's going to start there. I can feel it. I'm getting too old to work with the horses, anyway." And off to California they went.

San Francisco didn't feel very different, at first. If anything, people were more suspicious, and more afraid. In Santa Fe, the idea that two men could fall in love rarely crossed people's minds; here, the existence of such a thing was undeniable. When their first landlord suspected the truth, he voided their lease, and they had to find another apartment in a less-desirable part of town with barely a week's notice. Without the security of a private ranch, every waking hour seemed fraught with danger.

But then, quietly and steadily, things began to get better. It started with the Communist party -- not the safest thing to be involved in, and Jack and David were never anywhere closer than the fringes, but they'd grown up with socialist ideals and were attracted to others who saw equality as a major societal goal. From there they found the Mattachine Society -- the first place in their entire lives where they'd felt they could be themselves. They were nearly 70 years old. It had taken far too long, but finally, they were living openly, at least in this small community. Finally, they were fighting back. And though their bodies were old, though David had begun to walk with a cane and Jack needed thick glasses to see, they still felt the same rush they had at 17, fighting Pulitzer and his cronies. They were going to stop the world, again.

It wasn't easy. In 1955, Jack was arrested in Golden Gate Park on suspicion of lewd behavior; he hadn’t been doing anything wrong, but a cop had seen him at a demonstration and wanted to teach him a lesson. It took all of David's intelligence and arguing power -- not to mention his high position at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he'd transferred when they left Santa Fe -- to get him out of prosecution. It wouldn't be the last close call they would face. But they knew it was worth it. They knew they were doing what they'd always been meant to do.

David retired in 1963; Jack had retired long before that. And with the end of their jobs also came the end of their hiding. They moved to the Castro, where a gay community was quickly forming, and they vowed never to call themselves brothers ever again. As they walked down the street, David held his cane in one hand and Jack's hand in the other, and the most reaction they got was a smile. Jack began holding court on the front steps of their apartment building, telling their story to anyone who would listen, and David knew they had finally found peace.

David turned back to Tom. His stop was coming up. "Hard?" he repeated. "Maybe. But I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world."

Tom nodded. "I figured. And I'm -- I'm sorry for your loss. Everyone is."

The cable car stopped, and David stood cautiously, brushing down the front of his black suit. "Thank you," he said. "I appreciate that very much. Jack would have liked you." And with that, he grabbed his cane, stepped down from the car, and hobbled toward the door to the funeral parlor to deliver a eulogy he'd never thought he'd be allowed to give.


End file.
